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A Peaceful Conquest

Woodrow Wilson, Religion, and the New World Order

The University of Chicago Press

From Reconstruction to Regeneration

Woodrow Wilson was a deeply religious man. Men who do not understand the religious spirit need not even try to understand him.

— Edwin Alderman

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. ... To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

— W. E. B. Du Bois

Thomas Woodrow Wilson grew up with the Civil War and matured alongside Reconstruction. Born in 1856 in the slaveholding South, "Tommy" experienced a momentous shift in American life firsthand. One month before his fourth birthday, he witnessed a man visit his childhood home to tell his father, Reverend Joseph Wilson, the presidential election results. Abraham Lincoln had been elected president, and they expected war to follow. From his bedroom window in Augusta, Georgia, Tommy watched trains bring men and munitions to aid Confederate rebels. After the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863, the church where his father preached became the hospital where his mother, Janet (Woodrow) Wilson, cared for wounded soldiers. The grounds of the church where he often played baseball with his friends became a prison for Union soldiers. After the North secured its victory, Tommy looked on from the steps of the manse as Union soldiers escorted the president of the Confederate States of America in chains to prison. The South, especially the churches shaping its regional identity, held the Wilson family together, supplied their livelihood, and determined their sense of what it meant to be American. This war between brother soldiers and their nations haunted the American culture they knew well after union was restored.

As he developed in the shadow of the war, Tommy chose to be called Woodrow. Time and age led Woodrow to craft his own identity in light of past sectional strife. Tommy, the young rebel, likely never imagined that one day he would be president of the United States — let alone think of himself as being compared favorably to Lincoln. Thomas Woodrow Wilson's life seems to be filled with contradictions like these. The historical record is scattered with evidence that does not seem to add up. Although "Tommy" was born into a prominent southern Presbyterian home supportive of the Confederacy and slavery, "Woodrow" would be known as a champion of self-determination and equality among nations. This son of a Confederate chaplain devoted his career to promoting the need to serve humanity and renewing the nation's democracy; however, his civil service also established precedents for segregating government offices, restricting access to public institutions, and limiting democratic participation among African Americans, women, and immigrants. And yet, throughout his life, whether as a Confederate sympathizer or as president of the United States, he used the same scripture as his guide. Making sense of how these aspects of his life were consistent, rather than contradictions, is key to understanding Wilson and the American culture he knew.

Southern Evangelicalism and Its Discontents

Reverend Joseph Wilson and his wife, Jessie, instilled in their children the values of discipline and decorum typical of white middle-class Presbyterians in the South. They attended church twice a week; they prayed together at their family dinner table; they ate meals prepared by an African American domestic worker; and they enjoyed parlor entertainment after their meals, often singing hymns alongside a melodeon. They lived neither in poverty nor complete privilege; the Wilsons' home contained the "comfort and simplicity" of southern Victorian décor. As one family friend recalled, a visitor could walk through their home and find the walls and the library contained both "sacred and secular" objects. This was not surprising for a southern manse. Rather than detract from the importance of Christianity, this mix of interests demonstrated the family's investment in a well-educated Christian life filled with a variety of experiences.

As was the case for other white southern evangelical families, patriarchy was the gravitational force that held the Wilsons' private and public lives together. Their home internalized and modeled the larger order they believed to be natural for society. Reverend Wilson was a public figure for the Presbyterian Church, but the home served as the center of his family's Christian identity. His leadership at home provided one of his first lessons to his children in understanding God's will and order for the universe. Intending to imitate Christ's relationship to the church, the southern patriarch aimed to embody God's sovereignty and the social hierarchies flowing from it. By his leadership in the home and in public life, he taught his children how to understand race, class, and gender as a part of God's design. Because the Wilsons believed white men had a pivotal role to play in private and public life, Reverend Wilson gave special attention to his son.

As members of a Calvinist tradition, the Wilsons considered education key to learning and living their interpretation of Christian theology. When a young Tommy experienced difficulty learning how to read, for example, his father tailored his lessons to account for his son's needs rather than merely accept this circumstance. Recognizing God's design did not preclude human action to improve upon one's condition. Rather than dwell on Tommy's weakness, Reverend Wilson focused his son's studies on the art of debate and oration, using biblical hermeneutics as his guide. Tommy improved his reading skills while further developing his existing strengths. Reverend Wilson, as a highly respected southern minister, ensured that his son would not only know his church doctrine but would also overcome his shortcomings through a disciplined work ethic. This form of instruction served several purposes, as father taught son that studying and reciting their beliefs went hand in hand with putting those beliefs into practice. Through both circumstance and design, Reverend Wilson applied the truths he knew from church to his children's lives at home.

For the Wilsons, the purpose of Tommy's education was not merely to increase his knowledge but to embody God's will for the edification of the entire family. Reverend Wilson's lessons, then, became an opportunity to further cultivate proper male leadership. Together, father and son developed shared interests as the patriarch modeled acceptable forms of piety and play. Both developed an affinity for reading, enjoying especially the work of Walter Scott. A popular writer among white southerners, Scott validated white male authority and the social life of the Old South. Their mutual fondness for creative prose led them to challenge each other with verbal contests, usually with puns. Playfulness taught Tommy the boundaries of work and leisure and what his father considered the proper balance of the two. The reverence and constructive play found in the Wilsons' home could also be found in other white Calvinist homes in the nineteenth-century South. By his parents' faith and purposeful instruction, every aspect of young Tommy's life could serve as a lesson for constructing his Christian character.

As the family patriarch, Reverend Wilson loomed large in his son's life. Looking back on his childhood as an adult, Wilson recalled: "[My father] was the best instructor, the most inspiring companion, I venture to say, that a youngster ever had." While he admired his father, he kept their relationship in mind, never forgetting his place in the family hierarchy. Inside the walls of a church, he could only think of himself as Reverend Wilson's son. Even though Tommy would eventually hold the highest political office in the nation, he remained humbled at the thought of his father. Standing before his own presbytery as president of the United States, he confessed, "I only wish that I could claim some of the vital connection with the church which he could claim — because those of us who stand outside of the active ministrations of the church, so to say, get an illegitimate usury from it. We do not seem to add a great deal to its capital, but we do live on its investments." Reverend Wilson played such a large role in shaping his son's understanding of Christianity that Tommy grew to be a man who believed he only lived off of the dividends of his father's investments.

As Reverend Wilson received ministerial appointments in the postbellum South, the Wilson family moved from Virginia to Georgia in 1860, Georgia to South Carolina in 1870, and South Carolina to North Carolina in 1874. Along the way, Wilson's mother ensured the stability of the family's Christian home. Despite the prominence of Reverend Wilson in both historians' accounts and Wilson's own memories, it was Jessie who taught her children formal Presbyterian doctrine through the catechism. Decades later, Tommy and his wife, Ellen, followed the same practice. Ellen, like her mother-in-law, instilled formal Presbyterian doctrine in her children as well. For both generations of Wilsons, the home — rather than the church — served as the basis of a Christian education. Reverend Wilson insisted upon this practice because he believed "if they couldn't give their own children religious instruction at home, [then] Sunday School wouldn't help much." Together, husband and wife poured the foundation for their children's understanding of scripture, a precursor to the moral structure that would be erected by the church.

The Wilson family's emphasis on hearth and home was part of their larger commitment to a Calvinist notion of divine order. For the Wilsons, first the home and, second, life beyond its walls confirmed God's sovereignty. Norms for racial, religious, class, and gender hierarchies reflected what they believed to be the proper order of the cosmos. The Wilsons, like other white southern evangelicals, affirmed the institution of slavery as evidence of God's design. After examining scripture, Reverend Wilson determined slavery not only had roots in biblical history but also advanced Christianity. He insisted that the institution was "a first and important step in ascertaining the will of God." In his eyes, men who disapproved of slavery were "shortsighted"; those who declared it "unworthy of the countenance of Christianity" were "wicked." When masters cared for their slaves as Christ did the church, Reverend Wilson believed, slavery revealed supernatural truths about God and humanity. Since slaves and slave masters confirmed God's order, he instructed his congregants to see any threat to the institution as a threat to God's will. Furthermore, he saw no reason to fear divine punishment for upholding slavery and slaveholders because the Bible was "silent" on direct prohibitions against it.

According to his sermon "Mutual Relation of Masters and Slaves," Reverend Wilson believed slavery pleased God by "saving a lower race from the destruction of heathenism" and, when "under divine management," it could "refine, exalt, and enrich its superior race." Reverend Wilson's position reflected a typical Calvinist understanding of society: all people can be equal before God while not necessarily equals to each other economically, politically, or socially. Patriarchs, for instance, naturally existed above their spouse, children, and property because they held a duty to protect those under their care. To Reverend Wilson, society inherently included superior and inferior races as well as classes of people. The Wilsons believed upholding this social order not only improved the lives of slaves but also, and perhaps more importantly, edified white masters as they performed their biblical duty to care for the least among them. Many white southern Christians agreed. The Wilsons, together with their church and surrounding community, taught their children in word and deed that white male leadership was at the heart of God's design.

The Wilson family's insistence on a divine order based on white supremacy made a lasting impression on Tommy. Along with other young white men in the Reconstruction South, Tommy tried to make sense of his place in American culture following the Civil War. In both his private and public papers, he reconsidered the lessons his parents taught him in light of the South's defeat. Rather than assert the "natural," biblical differences between races, he insisted upon social differences as a matter of practicality. In an unpublished essay, "The Politics and the Industries of the New South," Tommy argued that white southerners had to remain unified because they were faced with an opposing unified voting bloc in franchised freedmen. "Never to suffer themselves to be ruled by another race in every respect so unlike themselves," he claimed, white southerners took the most "intelligible" course. As a law school graduate, Tommy did not consider this position as a matter of racial animosity but sound reasoning. He claimed he did not object to the color of nonwhite skin. Tommy insisted instead that these social hierarchies were a matter of "intelligence" and "design" when he felt threatened by African American men being included within the body politic.

As he reinterpreted his regional past, Tommy began to reconstruct his own identity. He published several essays on whiteness, blackness, and the place of the South in American culture. As he did, he wrote under pseudonyms and changed his pen names several times between his first classes at Davidson College in North Carolina and completion of his graduate degree at Johns Hopkins University. In one such essay, he clarified his reasons for resisting the enfranchisement of freedmen: "We object to their votes because their minds are dark, [because] they are ignorant, uneducated, and incompetent to form an enlightened opinion on any of the public questions which they may be called on to decide at the polls." Maintaining divisions between whiteness and blackness, he attempted to shift the focus of difference from race to education. Wilson, like others attempting to reconstruct a republic built upon a white Protestant nationalism, tried to soften his rhetoric but continued to reinforce the importance of white men's minds and bodies.

Wilson's worldview was complemented — if not bolstered — by his first wife, Ellen. Also the child of a Presbyterian minister, Ellen (Axon) Wilson cherished the South and ensured that her children knew their white southern evangelical roots. When she was pregnant with the first of her three children, Ellen moved away from her husband, who was teaching at Bryn Mawr College, to return to Georgia. In spite of the potential risks of traveling by herself, she insisted on the move because she did not want her child born a Northerner. Ellen's staunch support of the South as culturally superior to the North continued after the birth of her children. Their daughter Eleanor remembered being "hustled off to school at Raleigh, North Carolina" because her mother "did not want me to talk like a 'Yankee.'" As the children of northern transplants following Reconstruction, Eleanor and her sisters had to learn — just as their nineteenth-century evangelical grandparents did — how to speak "southern." The Wilsons must have considered the decision successful, as Eleanor wrote in her memoir: "I went, determined to acquire an accent like [my mother's], and in a few weeks was more southern than any southerner — speaking what father called 'educated n-----.'"Eleanor was proud that her education inoculated her from being a complete Northerner, allowing her to continue her parents' cultural heritage. Wilson casually dismantled his daughter's sense of accomplishment, however, reminding her that regardless of appearances, her southern identity was adopted, a learned and therefore unnatural performance. Although they lived in the North, the Wilsons' daughters constructed their own southern identity by focusing on what could be shared between the two regions: evangelicalism and white supremacy.

Historians' attempts to place Wilson in relationship to racism in America is confusing at best. Some historians contend that Wilson held "advanced" views for a southerner of his time. Since Wilson wrote optimistically about human progress and spoke eloquently about the advancement of democracy, this reasoning suggests, he cannot be fully associated with the culture of the "Old" antebellum South or groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Other historians admit that as president, Wilson supported racist policies, but those actions were inconsistent with his Christian piety or devotion to democratic expansion. The existing documentation makes abundantly clear that Wilson opposed enfranchising freedmen because he saw such enfranchisement as the main source of the New South's problems. Likewise, Wilson did not recognize a contradiction between his membership in the Presbyterian Church and his belief in the superiority of white "Anglo-Saxons." As he learned from his parents and as he taught his own daughters, upholding racial hierarchies and preserving patriarchy maintained God's order. To the Wilsons, this social order preserved in legal codes and social mores ensured that all in America — full citizens, freedmen, and their dependents — followed God's will.

Wilson did not, however, merely mirror his parents' worldview for the rest of his life. While Reverend Wilson and Jessie were certainly influential in shaping their son's identity, they did not share the same ideologies. After all, he did not grow up in his father's South. "Tommy" became "Woodrow" as the "Old" South became the "New" South. Tommy's world was oriented around his father's church and the battles of the Civil War near their manse in the South; Woodrow enjoyed the privilege of studying law and political science at multiple universities in the North. When the South struggled with the social, economic, and political consequences of the war and Reconstruction, Woodrow wrote essays about it from Princeton, New Jersey. Describing Reverend Wilson's worldview tells us what Wilson might have learned as a boy, but it does not necessarily tell us what Wilson believed as an adult man. Both father and son agreed that life on earth reflected a divine order, but seismic shifts in American culture separated these men's notion of what constituted God's proper order. Each fervently sought to follow God's will, but their means to do so diverged as American evangelicalism changed following the Civil War.

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Excerpted from A Peaceful Conquest by Cara Lea Burnidge. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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